Cheers to Leanpub! (yeah, yeah)

Leanpub authors and press people have said, tweeted, emailed and blogged lots of nice things about us! Here's some of the ones we like the best...

Elisabeth Hendrickson

Elisabeth Hendrickson wrote a fantastic blog post which captures the entire reason Leanpub exists, from the perspective of an author who had just finished her Leanpub book -- in 4 days.

A funny thing happened on my way to inbox 0 last week: I wrote a book in 4 days.

I didn’t mean to. And actually it’s not true to say that I wrote it in just 4 days. I assembled it in 4 days; I wrote it over 15 years. Allow me to present There’s Always a Duck, now available on Leanpub.

--Elisabeth Hendrickson, It's a Book

If you're wondering whether to try Leanpub, go read her entire blog post. It sells Leanpub better than we can!

BTW, I have to say that I'm incredibly impressed with Leanpub.

You have made it absurdly easy to do something I've been talking about doing for a long time (turning my blog archive into something more permanent).

I've played around with various services: CreateSpace, Lulu, and SmashWords. They're all easy enough to use, but no matter what service I chose, I recognized that it was going to be a pain to import all that content and convert it into a format that would work. Importing from an RSS feed into plain text / markdown, then auto-generating the resulting ebook formats is brilliantly simple.

Plus, using DropBox as the shared repository is sheer genius. As a geek, I've used svn and git as a repository for my prose. Source control is my friend. But setting up a shared repo can add a wee bit of friction. Using DropBox is a beautiful friction-free way to share while still letting me version my files if I decided it's needed. Really, really sweet.

Also, having just purchased Laurent Bossavit's recent Leanpub title, Leprechauns of Software Development, I was delighted by how easy it was to be a paying customer.

I had no intention of spending my day working on converting my archives into a book. It was way down on my priority list. But I'm having so much fun (despite the mysterious "there was a failure..." message)! Now if I can just keep distractions at bay long enough to finish, I'll finally have a book done. Wow.

Oh, and your customer service rocks also! I'm very grateful for your personal attention!

--Elisabeth Hendrickson, email (reprinted with permission)

Time.com

So. You got a blog. You want to turn it into a e-book, with a minimal amount of fuss and hard work.

You need Leanpub. It’s a new service for writers who want to do minimalist home-grown publishing on their own terms, in a variety of formats that will suit owners of iPads, Kindles, and other e-readers.

It’s also a completely new approach to the technical side of e-book publishing. When you sign up to Leanpub, you get access to a shared folder on Dropbox, into which you can put text files for your book.

Giles Turnbull, Time.com, Leanpub: How to Turn Your Blog into an Instant E-Book

Nivi from Venture Hacks

Thanks to Peter Armstrong and Scott Patten at Leanpub for making this book happen. If you want to turn your blog into a book, get in touch with them.

Babak Nivi, The Venture Hacks Bible